The purpose of this study was to examine specific feautres of child language change as determined by change in vocabulary, complexity of sentences and functional use of sentences, and relationships of these changes to the teachers' facilitative or directive verbal behavior. Subjects were 112 nursery school children. Teacher verbal behavior was…

Discusses grammar and spelling instruction in The Netherlands for students aged 10-15 and describes an intelligent computer-assisted instructional environment consisting of a linguistic expert system, a didactic module, and a student interface. Three prototypes are described: BOUWSTEEN and COGO for analyzing sentences, and TDTDT for conjugating…

Analysis of basilang speech (in terms of word order, reference to time, and reference to space) of Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese speakers of English as a second language indicated that oriental subjects tended not to use prepositions and that Spanish-speaking subjects tended to use "in" to express most locative meanings. (Author/CB)

Three small multilingual groups of learners of English as a foreign language worked on three text-based computer-assisted language learning tasks. While the students worked, their conversations were videorecorded for the purpose of investigating the possible utterances (spin-off) generated from the activity in terms of interaction in the target…

Describes a study done to identify those syntactic structures that effectively communicate ideas in written German composition of fourth-semester students. Also identified were grammatical structures that writers can control on a syntactic level, but which they do not employ as a communicative strategy. (Author/SED)

Discusses insights and concerns growing out of a study in which middle school and high school language arts teachers examined the research in the teaching of grammar and examined the content, methods, and materials of their own grammar curriculum. Details process guidelines and content guidelines that were developed. (EL)

Analyzes the language of five popular children's shows on public television. Suggests that the public television shows provide a superior language model than that of commercial television. (HOD)

Describes and examines the word choice and frequency in six tests and raises questions about the use of word lists and controlled vocabulary in producing basal readers, judging and manipulating readability of texts, and building vocabulary. (HOD)

Phrasal verbs occur frequently in written and spoken English and may be difficult for non-native speakers to understand and produce, particularly when parts of the phrasal verb should be separated and when they should be adjacent. The study reported here analyzes natural data in context to determine whether the word order of the parts of a…

This collection of lesson plans for teaching English as a Second Language includes the following: "You Scratched Me!" which has students examine verbs in three forms (base, past, and progressive) together with questions, accelerating the memorization and understanding of verb forms and tenses; "Getting Acquainted/Inferential Thinking," which…

This textbook provides support for learners of British Sign Language (BSL) and others interested in the structure and use of BSL, and assumes no previous knowledge of linguistics or sign language; technical terms and linguistic jargon are kept to a minimum. The text contains many examples from English, BSL, and other spoken and signed languages,…

Examines the changes that occur from ages 5 to 11 in question/answer sequences of Dutch children. Function, content, form of questions, and listener response are analyzed. (EKN)

The linguistic complexity of grammatical structures depends on their usage. Such complexity must be purposefully controlled by the teacher of English as a second language. Examples of shortcomings in the presentation of various structures in current textbooks illustrate this point. (PMJ)

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects aged 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years, as well as college students, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb in order to determine whether Hebrew speakers can rely on a word order strategy to assign sentence relation. (MP)

Discusses why Japanese students frequently passivize certain intransitive English verbs. It is suggested that students might make this error because they associate adversity with the passive construction and use passives whenever adversity is implied. Discussion of other expressions implying adversity and implications for both applied and…